Biography

The Turpins had been established at Knaptoft for nearly a century since acquiring the estate by marriage with an heiress: they had enclosed and improved the village and become prominent in the county. George Turpin’s father also held lands elsewhere in the midlands, and his mother, a niece of Thomas Ruthall, bishop of Durham, had brought a substantial dowry with her.3

Turpin’s early life is obscure, but on the pardon roll of 1554 he is described as ‘alias of London’, and his appointment to the commission of oyer and terminer in that year implies that he had received some legal training. He had succeeded his brother as head of the family in 1551 and his marriage to the daughter of a Northamptonshire man may have followed shortly afterwards. He also enjoyed influential connexions within his own county: Thomas Farnham was to bequeath him, as a near and very dear kinsman, some personal property, and through Farnham and his cousin Francis Farnham these connexions extended to the Caves and the Nevilles of Holt, while Nicholas Beaumont†, with whom Turpin shared the supervision of the estate which Thomas Farnham left to his daughter Catherine, remained an associate until the two men quarrelled dramatically. It was presumably on the strength of their support that Turpin achieved the junior knighthood of the shire in the third Marian Parliament, despite his relative youth.4

Turpin’s active public career under Elizabeth was to include Membership of two Parliaments and varied service in his county. He died in 1583.